I am wondering if its going to dawn on BT that linking all those addesses, and dealing with all the people they will cut out through mistakes, or lack of awareness, and the loss of goodwill, will cost them more than just keeping all the addreses running. That may be the simpler proceedure they are looking for. If there is any cost involved, they could have cut it by just askeing the people concerned about terminated addresses that hadn't been used for a year . Much more sensible than looking at accounts, noting they were in use, and then asking people if they wanted to use them.

Yeah BT have messed up by doing this, do you reckon it will actually go ahead?

Did you not get another E-Mail from BT like the one I posted the other day...

Nope, surprisingly enough haha

I haven't received any e-mails since the initial one announcing the 16th September cut-off. They'll most likely back-pedal as it will cost them goodwill, positive PR as well as subscribers. Surely this a 'loss-leader' they can afford to bear? Even though we don't currently pay anything, we clearly have done once-upon-a-time and may well do again - I for one am always switching providers - and are nevertheless BT subscribers. Providers are fluid but e-mail addresses should be constant. Not that I care, mind: I hardly ever use it but this is an epic own goal from BT...

No no sign of that one. No idea what that means.

Discovered I'd received the follow-up e-mail dated September 13th when I logged on on Thursday 19th. Ok, I hadn't logged on for 3 days but it hadn't arrived when I'd last checked on Monday 16th. This is why I don't use the account: it's always been very, very dodgy...

Honestly? I don't think that's unreasonable. You're not a customer of theirs any more (*)- i.e. you're not paying any money to them otherwise- and they're charging you a small amount to keep your email with them. £19.20 a year isn't extortionate.

I pay around £15 a year to my former dial-up Internet provider for continued use of that email address. To be honest, I didn't think that was excessive. (**)

It's a bigger concern that I signed up for so much stuff with that address and would have a problem it if they ever stopped providing it. (I should have used my personal domain email address instead, but that was my problem.)

(*) Not defending BT, who are crap in a number of respects, but you were going to phone a company you're no longer with and don't pay any money to (for a free email service) and complain that you're not happy? Do you expect them to apologise profusely and beg to keep you as a non-customer so that they can continue to receive no money from you?

(**) Though my case is slightly different- I was with a smaller ISP that appears to be commercially dormant, so there are probably minor costs associated with the parent company keeping the service going. BT, OTOH, are still active and have economy of scale, so the cost of keeping a given account going probably isn't high. Still don't think £19.20 a year is excessive, though.

Even if they originally signed to to BT with the promise of a free email for life?

Because BT Broadband is shyte?

I have signed up for the £1.60 a month premium email - as its a small price to keep my email account.

However I mistakenly rang up BT with a query about it - as they hadn't sent me an account number to set up online billing.

It just reminded me what an appalling company it is with dreadful customer services - and thus why I left. I ended up being pushed from pillar to post from email technical help, to account billing to this and that - I felt like I had spoken to the entire Indian subcontinent by the end of the call. And no one could help me out i.e. if you are going to ask people to set up online billing tell them what their account number is!

Eventually got sent one in the post - why on earth could they not have emailed the account details to me?

Never again will I join BT for broadband, phones or TV - I would rather go without if they were the last provider!

i'm an internet provider and i don't think people know the cost of running servers or even hard disk space of thousands of old unused emails, i'm having the same issue of storing old stuff on servers here that most likely will never be opened, read or even checked again

Are you sure that's *exactly* what they promised, and are you sure that they said they'd keep providing that, regardless of whether you stayed with them or not, or is this just an assumption?